Let the audience know about the danger the characters do not: a hidden bomb that goes off gives seconds of surprise, a bomb the audience has seen gives minutes of suspense.
In his 1962 interviews with François Truffaut, published in 1966, Hitchcock described two people talking at a table with a bomb beneath it. If it simply explodes, the audience gets fifteen seconds of surprise; if they have been shown the bomb and the clock, an ordinary conversation becomes fifteen minutes of suspense. Gotthold Lessing made a similar argument about stage drama in the 1760s.
In practice
- A thriller shows the viewer the killer hiding in the house before the heroine comes home, and every room she enters becomes unbearable.
- A product launch video reveals the deadline at the start, so the montage of engineers at work reads as a race.
- Possible explanations
- The explanation is that suspense depends on anticipation, and anticipation needs information. Giving the audience knowledge the characters lack turns them from observers into participants who want to warn.
- In its favour
- It is standard teaching in screenwriting and is consistent with research on narrative suspense, which finds that readers and viewers report more suspense when they can foresee an outcome and care about the character.
- Against it
- Critics note that surprise has its own uses, that withholding information drives mystery and twist plots, and that Hitchcock himself relied on surprise in films such as Psycho. Some research also finds that suspense persists even when the outcome is already known, which complicates the information account.
- Standing
- A cousin of Chekhov's Gun: both are about planting what the audience will later need.
- Subject
- Communication & Media
- Essay
- Rules for speaking, writing and disagreeing